Google Books updated, gets new embedding, browsing features

Google Books has gotten some feature love lately. The online book and magazine …

Google has made a number of improvements to the functionality of Google Books that should make it easier for users to search for and share information. Users can now embed pages to books found in the online book repository on their own websites, link friends directly to specific pages, and have an easier time searching and browsing for content within the books.

To us, the coolest change is the ability to embed a "preview" of a book on any website or blog, just like you would with a YouTube video. When browsing a book, look for the "Link" link in the upper right-hand corner of the window, which will pop down with code to embed or just a link to copy and paste. We have embedded the first page of Shakespeare's The Twelfth Night below, which shows up as an iframe in the page.

Google has also improved upon its search functionality within public domain and partner books. When you perform a search, Google provides a snippet of where your search term shows up within the book as well as the context around the term—helpful for when your term could be used to describe more than one thing, or in different situations. Clicking on the images will bring you directly to that page in the book.

There are a number of other new features that help users browse through the offerings, including a new thumbnail view for books and magazines and a drop-down menu for the table of contents. And, if you're the type who doesn't care for those fancy pictures, there's even a plain text mode available for public domain books.

Finally, the Book Overview page now presents even more information related to the book at hand, such as related books, reviews, ratings, a summary, publisher information, and more. This is undoubtedly meant to entice you to check out a preview of the book and hopefully purchase it, but all the related metadata is nice to have when you're just clicking through looking for something interesting to read.

In a way, the fact that Google Books has managed to come this far is somewhat of a surprise, given the amount of legal trouble Google ran into with book publishers when the project was first launched. The Authors Guild sued Google in 2005 over Google Books, citing what it described as "massive copyright infringement." However, Google managed to settle the lawsuit in October of 2008 with a number of provisions that help clarify library rights and the formation of a group to search out copyright holders. There's still some concern about the settlement itself from some stakeholders.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui